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A friend told me she had purchased a tap dancing board for her home. She had danced as a kid, and now that she was reducing her work hours to part time as a transition to retirement, she was looking to make a little noise.
This gesture seemed so delightfully whimsical that I looked up “home dance boards” online to see if such transcendent items were indeed available to anybody with a patent-shoe past and a current passion. I thought about her home studio for days, wondering if she might get a mirror, too, and a wooden barre. Recalling my own tap dance days, when I was five, I thought of Perry — the boy who knelt in front of me during the dance school’s year-end recital. His dark, slick hair smelled of Brylcreem; I knew this because my chin was perched over his shoulder during one of the dance poses. I sniffed his head hungrily during rehearsals until the teacher told me to stop. Shortly thereafter, my mother withdrew me from tap; apparently my toes were too square. You can imagine how I envied my friend her home board, and the world it opened for her.
I stepped out in my own way, however, when I decided this summer to attend a writing conference in Forest Grove, Ore. Part of the master of fine arts offered by Pacific University, a small college near Portland, the conference could be audited by those who weren’t enrolled in the full-time program.
Offered over 10 days, the program gave attendees the chance to work on a short manuscript of fiction with award-winning novelists and to attend talks on the craft of writing.
I had long dreamed of taking a writing workshop, but it wasn’t until I retired that I allowed myself the indulgence. Still, even as I packed my computer for the journey, I wondered why I was doing it. After all, it wasn’t as if I was about to launch a career as a novelist on the eve of my 65th birthday, right? And really, if you couldn’t be guaranteed some visible success, what was the point?
These questions reflected how I lived my life before retirement — frantically focused on productivity, money-making and career-building. Even though that was all behind me, the “why bother” question remained, poking uncomfortably at my spirit, my ego. But once I got to Oregon I became so engrossed in the writing community and in the act of writing, in its joy and perplexity, its sudden flashes of knowing — that the why of it all was subsumed.
Questions such as what difference the conference would make in my life, and whether the money could be better spent, faded. Instead, I thought about plot and character and setting. It reminded me of being a child, when I would read a book and feel like the protagonist — Francie Nolan, Jane Eyre, Mary Lennox — long after I had finished the text. It was dreamy. It was delicious.
On the surface, the writing program looked like regular university. We started each day at 9 a.m. in a room full of straight-backed chairs, hearing a talk delivered by a master of their craft. Some students, who ranged in age from 18 to 85, took notes on computers, others with pen and paper. We heard about ways to use humour in a grief memoir and how characters can be sketched through the lens of motherhood, or food, or fishing. One author had tips on how to write angry. After the group lectures, we broke into small clusters to go over each other’s manuscripts in a thoughtful and constructive manner. Often, fellow group members saw telling details in our stories, or opportunities for expanding a good idea, that we hadn’t seen ourselves.
I don’t know if people who study mathematics or engineering feel this way, but every once in awhile during a lecture at the conference, I was struck, stilled, by an insight offered by one of the instructors and wrote it down in my notebook. Rereading those notes later, however, was like looking at a discarded, blackened match; there was no rush of flame to remind me of how their words felt in the moment.
I wasn’t the only one hoping to bottle inspiration. One of the instructors was a Nigerian-born writer who had been imprisoned several times over his words, which on that day, in that lecture, fell softly, soothingly on our ears. A student asked if he had produced any books on tape because listening to his voice felt like prayer to her. The author said she could get to that same place without his voice, just by listening closely to the world around her.
I wondered if that was so.
Between lectures and workshops, I sat by myself in charming coffee shops. Sometimes I wandered the verdant grounds of the university, smelling the soft perfume of the linden trees, the sun pressing into my skin like warm flannel. I took several yoga classes at a studio on the second floor of an old building near campus. The shop below the studio was overflowing with vintage clothing, toys and cookware and the children of the proprietors hung around on the pavement outside, demonstrating tricks with whirling plastic hangers to passersby. Every night, I attended readings by the faculty. I bought novels and studied the authors’ prose, hoping to learn by osmosis, magic.
By the end of the conference, I was tired of thinking so intensely, and the thin plastic-covered mattress in the dorm room was uncomfortable. I was ready to go home and bring the lessons of the program with me. At this writing I feel in a kind of limbo like the girl I once was, square toes and all, who drifted between stories on a tide of imagination, wondering where I might land, and where I might go after that.
— Liane Faulder writes the Life in the 60s column. [email protected]